2017 What Car? Reliability Survey

In our 2017 Reliability Survey, we asked more than 14,200 people to tell us about any faults their cars have suffered during the past year. The results for cars aged 0-3yrs reveal the most - and least - dependable cars from 32 brands and 169 models

Words ByClaire Evans

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26 Oct 2017 00:01Last updated: 19 Dec 2017 12:39

There are lots of reasons why people buy cars, from a change in circumstances, such as becoming a parent, to retiring. But when it comes to why people keep their cars and stick with the same brand year after year, there’s one factor that has the biggest influence: reliability.

If your car regularly breaks down and leaves you stranded, or even if it just suffers from a plague of minor faults that require regular trips to the garage, you’re far less likely to pick the same brand again.

For each fault, we asked the owner to identify time spent off the road using categories ranging from less than one day
to more than a week. We also asked them to tell us how much the repairs cost, from being fixed under warranty for free to more than £1500. This information was weighted according to the severity of the fault; those that cost the most and kept the car off the road the longest were penalised most.

The data has been used to create our What Car? reliability rating, which is the score you see beside each model. Over the following pages, we reveal the best and worst contenders in 10 classes.